SWT VS. SWING

ŘEZNÍČEK, D.

Abstract

The contribution briefly describes differences between classical components SWING and newer graphics library SWT. SWT has been built as a fresh new way to develop desktop applications in Java. SWT does not have functional dependence on standard graphics Java API. All components are bound with native parts of appropriate operation system. Thus SWT gives applications a look and feel that matches the native look and feel, at least at the component level. SWING is a graphics part of GUI library Java Foundation Classes (JFC) and it came with Java 2. SWING has very good programming model, it contains all important components. But everybody knows, that SWING is very slow. Swing is a lightweight toolkit (it performs its own complete ren-dering) that does not work well with heavyweight widgets. Because SWT is a heavy-weight toolkit, SWING and SWT do not work well together, and in fact may never work together on some platforms. SWING is an extremely flexible toolkit that can offer performance on a par with that of SWT. In fact, because of the level of extensibility offered by SWING, its performance can highly exceed that of SWT. SWING requires very little from the native platform, allowing you to write once and run on a number of platforms without needing to consult the documentation of another toolkit. For all these reasons, SWING is still the superior technology for writing cross-platform applications.

Coresponding author e-mail: david[dot]reznicek[at]vslib[dot]cz

Session: Information Technologies in Automation